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Ok. I need some help on make a discussion. I want to manage my VM better and be able to use vmotion and the other product that VMware offers.

My current environment

2 – R710 connect to MD3000i
They are running VM ESXi 4.1 free

1 – R610 running on solo. The server is not connected to MD3000i. The server has 3TB of drive space on it.
It is running Dell VM ESXi 5.1

Ideal environment

I would like to manage all my VM using Vcenter. I would like to vmotion between all the servers if possible. I plan to connect the R610 to MD3000i, so I can get Vmotion done, but I was reading that MD3000i is not support by ESXi 5.1

18 Replies

Note, you are running vmware esxi 4.1 free. why not upgrade it? you can still run 5.1 esxi free, and my experience has been that 5.1 on the same hardware as 4.x runs better. However, for managing it with VCenter, you're going to need a license, as the free esxi can't be managed via vcenter (I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure you need at least the bare minimum license for vcenter agent)

Find out for sure exactly how long the VM can actually go down before it costs the company money. Depending on it's use, you'll more than likely find out that outside normal business hours it can go down long enough to upgrade the host.

If upgrading the host scares you too much, you've more than likely not installed esxi on a usb stick- which means it's also a good chance to learn about that (just slow to install, otherwise pretty much identical to a hdd install, and safer). You can run your install to it, your original 4.1 install is still safe, and if you have to, you can yank the stick in order to downgrade.

If you have done a usb install already for those boxes, then doing another isn't going to be an issue, especially since you can just pull the current stick, put in the new and run your install. If something isn't happy... replace the stick with the original.

vMotion is not available in Essentials. It is only in Essentials Plus. It is a very expensive feature that rarely makes sense in the SMB realm.

Agreed - I would like to know what you are currently using to backup your VMs. If you could use your backup solution to take more frequent backups (something like Veeam host-to-host replicas, etc) that might prevent you from needing Essentials Plus and vMotion.

You say you need the Essentials Plus package, but can it be justified based on the cost of downtime of your VMs? Are we talking about not able to have even 5 minutes of downtime at any point, not having 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc.?

vMotion is not available in Essentials. It is only in Essentials Plus. It is a very expensive feature that rarely makes sense in the SMB realm.

Sorry I meant Essential Plus. I need vMotion for business continuity. My plan was to run vCenter and use vMotion to move the VM between servers.

Thanks for the information about the usb stick.

That's some crazy high business continuity for an SMB. Have you run the numbers to make sure that that makes sense? vMotion is for scheduled maintenance. HA is for continuity. But very rarely does it financially make sense in an SMB, and decently rarely in an enterprise.

vMotion is not available in Essentials. It is only in Essentials Plus. It is a very expensive feature that rarely makes sense in the SMB realm.

Agreed - I would like to know what you are currently using to backup your VMs. If you could use your backup solution to take more frequent backups (something like Veeam host-to-host replicas, etc) that might prevent you from needing Essentials Plus and vMotion.

You say you need the Essentials Plus package, but can it be justified based on the cost of downtime of your VMs? Are we talking about not able to have even 5 minutes of downtime at any point, not having 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc.?

The VM is running an EMR. So downtime must be limited to schedule maintenance. So if I lose the host due to hardware failure, I am looking at two hour if I am luck. The two hour include drive time to the site. I haven't look into Veeam yet. Since I am running the free version of ESXI, HA is not option unless I go with Essentials or Essential Plus.

vMotion will not help you here. If the hot crashes you need to have HA running and the VM will automatically be restarted on a working host. vMotion has no recoverability features. It's really for moving the VM off of a host to another one without downtime, but both hosts need to be functional for that to happen.

So good for VMware host maintenance, or maybe some load balancing, but that's about it. The few times I've used it I basically had a VMware host that stopped responding to management (VM's continued to run fine, I just couldn't shutdown one host, it got lost in limbo). So I vmotioned everything off of that host, rebooted it and vMotioned everything back. The locked VM was fine after that.

vMotion is not available in Essentials. It is only in Essentials Plus. It is a very expensive feature that rarely makes sense in the SMB realm.

Agreed - I would like to know what you are currently using to backup your VMs. If you could use your backup solution to take more frequent backups (something like Veeam host-to-host replicas, etc) that might prevent you from needing Essentials Plus and vMotion.

You say you need the Essentials Plus package, but can it be justified based on the cost of downtime of your VMs? Are we talking about not able to have even 5 minutes of downtime at any point, not having 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc.?

The VM is running an EMR. So downtime must be limited to schedule maintenance. So if I lose the host due to hardware failure, I am looking at two hour if I am luck. The two hour include drive time to the site. I haven't look into Veeam yet. Since I am running the free version of ESXI, HA is not option unless I go with Essentials or Essential Plus.

Thank you for the all the information.

No, HA is about shaving the LAST FIVE MINUTES. That is all. Losing hardware would only mean being down about five to fifteen minutes. It does not take two hours to fire up the other VM. Most of the time between failure and recovery is waiting for the human to respond and tell the system to fail over.

HA is not an option unless you go Essentials Plus, Essentials offers no HA.

I would spend the money on storage however, perhaps VSA will be a good fit for you and with the cash leftover (aside from spending $20k on an MD3200i which is what I run) you can get essentials plus.

It always amazes me how everyone says money is tight, I need a free solution, etc, etc, however $5 or 6k on essentials plus to run the company is nothing! And you're in healthcare too? I'm not, but if I was an EMR was a concern, i wouldn't bet my job on $5k or even $20k for that matter.

It always amazes me how everyone says money is tight, I need a free solution, etc, etc, however $5 or 6k on essentials plus to run the company is nothing!

No one said money was tight, we said that it didn't make monetary sense, that is not the same thing. You are talking about $5K to shave a few minutes off of a possible future outage. Can you really justify having spent $1K per minute for an outage that might happen sometime in the next five years? That seems like a huge waste of money.

And then to run the whole thing on a single MD3200i and make the whole point of the HA moot so you aren't just wasting $5K on the HA but also wasting money on the second host and the SAN because you need neither of them as you don't have any HA at all but just fake HA at a massive price premium. This is tens of thousands of dollars to make a very fragile system that isn't as good as a single server without any failover hardware at all.

Saying you wouldn't bet your job on $20K is sensationism. You are betting your job on it either way. But saving the money is defensible to the CFO. Wasting the money is probably not and you are counting on them not actually looking into what you have done and hoping that showing them marketing will persuade them to excuse the waste of money for systems that pretend to protect them but do not actually do so.

I would spend the money on storage however, perhaps VSA will be a good fit for you and with the cash leftover (aside from spending $20k on an MD3200i which is what I run) you can get essentials plus.

Netapp just fired a lot of the enigmo engineers. I wouldn't invest in that platform (The MD3200 is an LSI Enigmo platform).
If your a dell shop I'd start at a minimum looking at EqualLogic for a disk array if not compellent.

I have a Dell MD3200 (3 years) and 2 Equalogics (PS 4500 & 6500) and I can say without a doubt that the MS3200 (SAS) is an awesome piece of hardware, especially the 6 gig SAS version which you can redundantly attach 4 hosts to. To this day I still run my mission critical high IO VM's (SQL, Exchange) on it since I can pull 600 mb/sec out (on say a Veeam backup) vs 60mb/sec on the iSCSI Equalogics. This would be a great solution for you for shared storage in your small environment. If you want a good example to your CFO as to why you should buy VMware essentials and an MD3200, send him my very own story that VMware highlights as a true success story for a small business and why you absolutely need this equipment as well as what may happen if you don't.

Again, you are a small guy and there are people who seem to think you have a lot of money to spend, this should be a slow process over time for you, build it into your budgets to your CFO. Small guys like us don't need hard core extremely expensive redundant SAN's as long as you are using a GREAT backup solution like Veeam and make sure you keep a little extra local storage on those servers in case of a disaster (say using 1 TB near line SAS 7.2K drives).